Friday 29 February 2008

Third camera takes a step closer.

I took a few hours off work yesterday to thread video cables up the four hundred and fifty year old spiral stone staircase of Derby Cathedral's tower. This done, it was a delight to be able to test out what everyone has been calling "Pudding Cam" - a dome camera generously donated to us by Acam Technology Ltd in Derby.
View down the spiral staircase inside Derby Cathedral during video cable installation
It was only a temporary installation, so there's no live images to show yet, but here's the first test picture. It is designed to sit on top of one of the lead gutters and should give us a great view across the "gargoyle ledge" at the very top of the tower. Our thanks go to Steve and the folks at Acam Technology who found us a camera that would fit through the tiny hole in the guttering. We only had to pay for the power supply and cabling, so the cost to the Peregrine Project was effectively halved. Follow this link to see more on our tests with Pudding Cam.

We also renewed our contract with Streamdays today, so broadband users should now be seeing pictures refreshing at least every six seconds. We hope that Streamdays might be able to speed this up a little more for us, though it could involve a reduction in image size - we'll see. Visitors do need to have Flash installed on their computers, and we hope to hear from dial-up users that they're still getting pictures OK. (Please remember to close your browser after watching, rather than leaving it running in the background.)


New visitors to this blog you may wish to read an overview of the peregrine project, or add their names to our mailing list.)


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